Caroline Giassi

Caroline Giassi, a native New Yorker, began playing music at the age of three with a Cracker Jack box as a violin. She eventually graduated to a real, wooden instrument and later switched to the modern oboe. She began playing historical oboes during her graduate studies at Yale School of Music, where she was the first and only wind player to join the Yale Baroque Ensemble. Giassi recently completed a second master’s degree at the Juilliard School as a full-tuition scholarship student in Historical Performance. Her principal teachers include Gonzalo Ruiz, Stephen Taylor, and Nancy Ambrose King, with secondary recorder studies with Nina Stern. As a principal oboist with Juilliard415, the school’s primary period-instrument ensemble, she performed in Japan, Singapore, France, England, and throughout the United States with conductors William Christie, Nicholas McGegan, Jordi Savall, Masaaki Suzuki, and Monica Huggett. She has also performed with William Christie and Les Arts Florissants (Festival dans les Jardins de William Christie), Philharmonia Baroque, Trinity Wall Street Baroque Orchestra, The Sebastians, New York Baroque Inc., Pegasus Early Music, and 4×4 Baroque.

Passionate about teaching, Giassi participated in the Music in Schools initiative at Yale, working with music students in New Haven public schools, and has taught music appreciation to second grade students at New York’s P.S. 84 as a Morse Teaching Artist in Juilliard’s outreach program. She served on the faculty at Lake Luzerne Music Center, the music summer camp where she first picked up the oboe as a middle school student.  She earned degrees in comparative literature and performance from the University of Michigan prior to pursuing her graduate studies.